Arsenal night: Guardian very funny, BBC truly awful

There is a piece in the Guardian today concerning last night’s Arsenal / Twenty Twenty game which really made me laugh out loud. Scroll down through the report, to the be underneath, and there you will find a minute by minute Dutchness rating of the McClaren. Not to everyone’s humour I’m sure, but it had me in fits.

Here’s an extract

32 mins Twente pass and pass and pass but never get anywhere. Just when you think they’re about to progress, the ball suddenly and mysteriously ends up back at the feet of their goalkeeper. Of course, we’ve seen this trompe l’oeil effect before: could it be they are stuck in an MC Escher print?

Dutchness rating: 82%

Meanwhile the BBC’s coverage of the game was the worst ever. There were calls for Arsenal to cheat (“if he’d fallen over at that point he’d have got a penalty”) and to foul “they need to ‘mix it’ more”) and precious little acceptance of a job well done. Much of the time there were negative comments about the style and approach.

I find it so sad – the BBC is a great cultural institution and yet they have let the sport drift into the hands of people who have modest communication skills and limited knowledge as they shuttle between one location and another.

But back to the Guardian. They win today’s prize for being silly in football. I feel much better for it.